


an ache I first felt long ago

by saysthemagpie



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Car Accidents, Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 13:03:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11185686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saysthemagpie/pseuds/saysthemagpie
Summary: It’s kind of funny, actually, the way people talk about him now, like he’s lost the love of his life. Probably the reason his first album is now topping the charts again, everybody desperate to get their little piece of the tragedy, to rehabilitate the whole sordid history, the lies and the betrayals and the years of infidelities, into the great doomed love story of a generation. If Harry were still around he’d laugh himself sick about it, but he’s not, and Zayn doesn’t much feel like laughing anymore.





	an ache I first felt long ago

**Author's Note:**

> edited and xposted from Tumblr. set in the same verse as [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10464669/chapters/23093913) short drabble, in which omega!harry and alpha!zayn accidentally bonded years ago when they were young and dumb and thought they were in love. then things fell apart; zayn left the band and started dating other people, but the bond can only be dissolved by death. um... warnings for major character death. 
> 
> title is from the mountain goats song "still feel the bruise," a painfully zarry song: _I'm under no illusion / as to what I meant to you / but you made an impression / and sometimes I still feel the bruise._

After it happens, people pretty much stop asking him to go and perform places, or even sign papers saying he might, someday, want to do all that again. Zayn doesn’t know why the label still keep him around, although Liam explains in that calm, infuriatingly gentle voice he uses a lot with Zayn lately, that he’s got a contract and that gives him certain rights. Also he’s got a face people will still pay money to look at in magazines, and now a not-so-secret tragic backstory. 

Liam leaves that last part out, but Zayn hears it anyway. It’s kind of funny, actually, the way people talk about him now, like he’s lost the love of his life. Probably the reason his first album is now topping the charts again, everybody desperate to get their little piece of the tragedy, to rehabilitate the whole sordid history, the lies and the betrayals and the years of infidelities, into the great doomed love story of a generation. If Harry were still around he’d laugh himself sick about it, but he’s not, and Zayn doesn’t much feel like laughing anymore.

He spends his days smoking in the gigantic office they gave him when he first signed, right in the center of the seventeenth floor. It’s got walls made of clear panes of glass, modern-looking, a little cold. Used to make him crazy, sitting in there hunched over his laptop, a guitar he couldn’t really play leaned up against the sofa. Like living in a very expensive fishtank. Two days into his first week he’d sent his assistant out to buy dark sheets, then tacked them up over the glass to block out the light. 

It feels like a cave now. Like Harry’s dressing room on tour, come to think of it, a dark womblike place. These days he spends most of his time lying on the floor or sprawled out on the sofa, listening to other people’s music and smoking up till he can’t remember how his fingers work, can’t make his thumbs cooperate for long enough to fill a bowl and pack it down. Can’t remember what he was trying to forget.

He thinks about Harry then, when he’s too high to do anything but stare at the crack between the bottom of the sheet and the floor where the light comes through. Mostly he thinks about how much Harry would’ve loved getting fucked facedown on the floor of his weird fishtank office, cheek pressed against the carpet and his leg hitched up so Zayn could knot him properly. Harry would’ve been wild for it, trying to keep quiet, thinking about all those people walking past in the hall and listening at the door. Wondering what the two of them were getting up to.

*

He’d felt the bond break. He’d been lying on the ground of the fishtank office, high as a kite and sort of floating above it all, thinking about a song. It felt like a tether inside him fraying, fraying, then – _snap_. He thinks he might’ve said Harry’s name aloud to the empty room. Like a question maybe, his voice stupid and slow and thick: _Haz?_

“There’s been an accident,” somebody said a while later, coming into the room. His P.A., with someone from the label right at her heels. “In L.A. Nobody’s been able to confirm it yet, it's just rumors right now, but they’re saying it’s – ”

But Zayn already knew.

*

 _It’s just chemicals._ That’s what Harry used to say afterwards, voice thick with disgust, right before he’d storm into the bathroom to scrub the smell of Zayn off his skin. That’s all a heat was. All a bond was, really: hormones gone wild in the blood, fucking you up, making you want it. Making you feel like nothing else could compare, that everything else was always just going to be a pale echo of the thing itself.

Zayn sort of blacked out for a bit, in his office. He can’t remember much of it, but the tabs said—citing _sources close to the star_ , of course—that he'd thrown up, or maybe shouted a lot, threw things at the glass. It’s hard to picture it, honestly, hard to imagine he would've been capable of. Some part of him hopes he made a scene. Harry would’ve liked that. _So you can feel,_ he would have said, insufferably smug. _So you did feel something._

Someone must’ve brought him home. When he woke up he was on the sofa in his living room, and Liam Payne was in his kitchen, shuffling about, making tea. Good old dependable Liam. Zayn hadn't known he still had a key. 

Later, after he'd made Zayn drink two bracing cups of tea, Liam wanted to talk. Zayn couldn't think of anything he'd rather do less, but it had felt like the only way to get Liam out of the house. _It was over fast,_ was what he wanted to tell Zayn, sitting on the edge of the sofa, not really meeting his eyes. He must’ve responded somehow. _Okay,_ he must’ve said, or _Jesus, Liam._ He finished his tea, and, once Liam finally went home, a fifth of whiskey. Then he got out his laptop and looked it up for himself. _The Sun_ had pictures of Harry’s ridiculous powder blue convertible, before and after. There were photos of the truck that hit him, too. Of the curve in the road where it had happened, of the metal fencing mangled where the car had crashed through, of the scenic drop-off. _Lover’s leap._

*

Liam’s so fucking stupid. Of course Harry would have suffered, body crushed inside the mangled car, face shattered against an airbag that failed to fully inflate. There was a nasty rumor going around, something the _Daily Mail_ picked up and loads of people retweeted after. A rumor that Harry had still been conscious when the paramedics managed to reach him. One of them—speaking strictly off the record, of course—said Harry had been _very brave,_ even when he must've known there wasn't any hope. 

That story was fake, he knows. A crash like that, Harry would’ve been long past the point of speech by the time they made their way down the side of the cliff. Even so he can’t get it out of his head. Harry wasn’t brave; Zayn knows that. He’d never wanted to face the hard truths. Always wanted everything sugarcoated, everything kept light and sweet and _nice_ , even when it was all going to shit. If he'd been conscious still when the paramedics came, Harry would've wanted someone to crouch down beside him, touch any part of him they could reach, and murmur lovely things to him about how he was going to be just fine, how everything as going to be just fine. Zayn would’ve been rubbish at it, the way he’d always been rubbish at comforting Harry. It’s a good thing he wasn’t there. It’s a good thing he hadn’t been there to hold Harry’s hand, to lace their fingers together, to whisper to him—Zayn doesn’t know what.

Not _sorry_. He isn’t sorry, for it, any of it, and Harry wasn't either. They’d been stupid kids, and they’d made a stupid choice, and until recently they were both ready to spend the rest of their lives paying for it. He supposes that's just what they've done, what Harry's done. It feels sometimes like everything they've ever done has been accelerated, life happening too fast: the band, the bond, the accident. 

He remembers the first time he drove that car. Remembers Harry’s hand on his leg, fingers splayed wide over Zayn's thigh, his head tipped back and laughing. Salt on the wind, the taste of it in his mouth. And after, parked behind the dunes on a beach somewhere, the taste of Harry too, squirming in the backseat, sucking in an oh when Zayn pushed his thighs apart and licked a long slow stripe over his hole, tasted the slick there. He’d knotted him just like that—a stupid risk, but worth it, having Harry’s legs slung around his waist, having Harry rocking on his knot, pupils blown wide, arching his back with a little cry as Zayn filled him up with his seed. 

*

There was going to be a baby. Liam takes him aside after the service, into a little antechamber off the chapel, to tell him personally. He wouldn't have delivered the news like this, he tells Zayn with a grim expression on his face, except that someone's leaked the results of the autopsy on Twitter, and in five minutes everyone in Britain's going to know. 

Ten weeks along. No one's sure if Harry even knew. 

Zayn leaves before they put the casket in the earth. He walks out of the chapel and into the miserable grey damp of a Northern morning. Sixteen hours later he’s back in LA, the sunshine beating down hard against the back of his neck as he sits stalled in traffic on the freeway, and it's over, it's done with, there's no point in thinking about it. There isn’t any baby, because there isn’t any Harry, not anymore.

It’s easier to just convince himself Liam’s lying. Harry wasn’t knocked up, and it definitely wasn’t Zayn’s, and they hadn’t fucked for the very last time just shy of three months ago, Harry’s heat coming on so sudden and strong he’d let himself into Zayn’s kitchen with the key he refused to give back, stripped himself naked and waited for him to come home, arse-up over the counter the way Zayn liked him best. It's easier to rewrite the narrative, to tell himself that Harry hadn’t begged, hadn’t trembled, hadn’t cried with relief when Zayn finally gave it to him—his knot, the only part of him Harry wanted anything to do with anymore.

Zayn’s good at pretending. He's been doing it for years now, hasn't he: pretending like it wasn't happening, even in those moments when it was actually, literally happening, their bodies locked together in a travesty of an embrace. Pretending like it meant nothing, less than nothing, that he never even felt the sting. 

“You should see somebody,” Liam tells him over the phone. “There’s specialists, you know. For broken bonds.”

But Zayn’s fine. It’s just chemicals, the way he wakes up disoriented in the middle of the night, the way he falls to his knees in front of the toilet, heaving up everything he hasn’t eaten—booze and bile—when he thinks about Harry crying, crushed in too tight, or broken to bits, so unexpectedly brave, wanting only to be held. It’s just chemicals fucking up his head, making him turn left instead of right when he’s meant to be driving to the studio and finds himself in some posh kids’ store in Beverly Hills instead. He sits on the floor of their model nursery and stares through the bars of a crib somebody else’s kid is going to look out of someday. He curls his fingers around the wooden slats, looking in at the soft pillows piled up inside, until a nice lady in a yellow cardigan asks him gently if there’s someone they should call, someone who might be able to help.

 _You’re such a fucking arsehole._ That was the last thing Harry ever said to him, tears shining in his eyes. He always cried when he was angry. _Your life’s a mess and your career’s a joke and I wish we’d never met. I wish you’d fucking stayed in bed._

*

After it happens, people pretty much stop asking him to do anything. Zayn crawls back into the womb he’s created for himself, a safe place at the heart of the fishtank office. The phone stops ringing, or he takes it off the hook, he can’t remember. It stops. Everything stops. He gets so high he can’t speak, so high he can’t cry. He lies facedown on the carpet and pretends he’s holding Harry’s hand, lacing their fingers together. There isn’t anything to feel that hasn’t been felt by someone else before. There isn’t anything to say that hasn’t been put in a card somewhere, or scribbled down in someone’s diary, or kept trapped forever in someone’s chest, a wild fluttering thing, battering itself bloody against the confines of his ribs. 

_Next time,_ he thinks sometimes, through the haze of smoke and grief. He whispers it, holding Harry’s hand, whatever part of him he can still reach. That’s what he would have said if it had been him there with Harry at the end. Zayn and his brave, frightened boy. And the baby, their baby, a promise between them only Zayn’s left to keep. He would’ve whispered the words in Harry’s ear, soft, if Harry wasn’t past hearing. _Swear to god, Haz. Next time we’ll get it right._


End file.
